Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [54]
The Russian spot, we were told, was a fairly straightforward, action-packed, high-energy compilation featuring Russian men sweating manly eastern European sweat, doing a variety of manly things. Our task was to come up with simple ways to replace the more overt Russian scenes with more iconic American elements. We had hoped that we could remedy the situation with a quick (cheap, painless) fix with stock footage or maybe inject a couple of fresher, more vibrant stock scenes of well-scrubbed, shirtless Americans playing beach volleyball, or touch football, or Frisbee. Maybe we could give it an audio upgrade with a contemporary American rock track (the Strokes? Lenny Kravitz?), or jump-start it with a stunning graphics package.
We gathered in a screening room—an art director, a producer, an account executive, and I—and braced ourselves as the producer popped the tape into the deck. Two scenes into the spot, we knew we were in trouble. This is before we were subjected to the gloomy images of surly Russian men playing chess, or wrestling in a USSR-era gym, or playing soccer in the shadows of the Kremlin. Then there was the quality of the film itself. “Dark,” “grainy,” and “amateurish” are three words that came to mind. And “white.” Which is understandable, since there aren’t a lot of Hispanic or black men in Russia.
We watched it one more time before unanimously deeming the production quality of the spot, even with any number of upgrades, unusable in the States. Swapping out Russian vignettes with new footage would only make the original scenes look even more archaic in contrast.
It didn’t matter. We could get Springsteen to score the music and put the hottest graphics house in the world on the case, and it still wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the poor quality and unsuitability of the film.
We’d need to reshoot the original, we told the managing partner on the account, and that would be a horrible waste of time and money, since the spot did sort of suck anyway, right?
He didn’t think so. “You’re telling me that you’re saying that none of the Russian footage is usable?”
“Yes, we are.”
“Well, then, take another look and come back with some solutions.”
At one point, several years before I came to Y&R, I had decided that I didn’t want to become the head of an agency, or start my own agency, or even become the creative director of an agency. Not that I was on the verge, or that level of success was necessarily within my grasp. It’s just that I’d had a brief taste of the all-consuming life at N. W. Ayer and had quickly rejected it (or, it could be argued, it rejected me). Even if I did have the talent or presence or political savvy to operate at such a level, and that all remained to be seen, the life sacrifice seemed too great. So for years I chose to work successfully and mostly without incident as a lone-wolf writer, or running my own small creative group within a larger department. The only problem with remaining at that level was that no matter how much experience or insight I brought to a project, there would be times when I had to acquiesce to people of higher rank, less experience, and lesser, let’s call it “emotional intelligence.” My brother, a New York City firefighter, was dealing with a similar situation on his job. A twenty-year veteran, he chose not to pursue the lieutenant, captain, chief path because regular firefighter hours allowed him to run a masonry business on his days off. But now, after having seen just about everything during his two decades in the Bronx, he found himself having to answer to people who outranked him, but often had considerably less knowledge about fighting fires. “That’s what we get,” I told him, “for sticking around so long and doing whatever the hell we wanted.” Of course his situation was exponentially different because lives were at stake, while in my position the worst that could happen is the client takes her deodorant